You could also set up your own SIP account with one of the many available providers, add credit and dial out to the phone system using that.

Attending A Meeting

Please mute yourself after joining, and at any time if you are not actively participating. All mobile phones and softphones, and some landline phones, have a mute button - use that for preference.

If you are using a phone without a mute button, or if you have a line noise problem on the normal phone system, then "*1" mutes and unmutes you at the Mozilla end. The trouble with this is that a) people can hear the 'beep', and b) you can forget to unmute because there is no visual indicator. Prefer mute buttons with obvious visual indicators, and get into the habit of checking them before speaking.

VoIP

Learn how to use your software. Prefer VoIP clients (like Blink) which show latency and packet loss so you can tell easily when your connection is sucking. Consider making a test call to your provider's echo service first to make sure everything is working fine. Watch out for your microphone being muted in your OS settings.

Get a decent headset. If you are planning to participate using VoIP, never do so just using the microphone and speakers built into your laptop. You'll get poor sound quality, and everyone apart from you will get lots of echo too. (This is particularly bad, as you don't notice the problem, but everyone else does.) Get a decent headset. Mozilla IT recommends the Plantronics .Audio 646 DSP USB headset. You can get them for £19 ($25; €17) from various branches of Amazon, and they work on Windows, Mac and Linux. If you are a regular participant in Mozilla conference calls and £19 is more than you can afford, let us know and we'll get one for you.

Get a stable internet connection. Airport and hotel WiFi are often not good.

Volume controls

Pressing * by itself will give you an audio menu with the following:

*1 mute/unmute and exit the menu

*4/*6 make the conference quieter/louder to you (see below)

*7/*9 make yourself quieter/louder to everyone else (see below)

When dialing the volume controls, you remain in the menu. You can dial 4, 6, 7, or 9 repeatedly in any combination to adjust the volume in each direction. Please dial 8 once you get it to the volume level you want to exit the menu. If you forget to dial 8 it will eventually time out and tell you "Invalid Option"

Setting Up A Meeting

Picking a conference number

Borrow a number in the range 8601-8608 (ie: 8601, 8602, ...) for the duration of the meeting; or

File an IT Request (at least 24 hours in advance) requesting a new conference number.

Publicising your meeting

There are conference templates you can use on your wiki page for conference audio-only conferences and Vidyo conferences, which automatically include accurate dial-in information for your conference room. Add the following to your wiki markup, where 12345 is your conference number:
For audio-only: {{conf|12345}}
For Vidyo: {{vidyoconf|12345}}

Conference settings

Mozilla employees can use the Jive web interface to manage settings and view and manage the current inhabitants of your conference room. It requires a bookmarked URL. Please file a ServiceNow ticket to request access for a room you own if you don't have the URL.

Vidyo conference rooms which you own can be managed via the Vidyo Client.

Moderator controls

*2 - lock/unlock the room

*3 - eject the last person to enter

*81 - Roll call or user count

*82 - Eject all non-admins

*83 - Mute/unmute all non-admins

Inviting participants

On the wiki page for your meeting, write e.g. {{conf|225}} or {{vidyoconf|225}} to include instructions with the "California" and "US toll-free" phone numbers, along with a link to this page. (Example)

Consider including an Etherpad URL for notetaking, an IRC backchannel, and a physical location in one or more offices.

Be sure to specify the time zone in your messages. For recurring meetings, the Mozilla standard is to fix the time in the US Pacific Timezone, rather than in UTC.

Mozilla employees can use Google Calendar to find out when invitees are free, send invitations, and book a conference room.

Troubleshooting

Help! Where's that noise coming from?

Causes

If a speaker has an echo, someone else is causing it by not being muted (usually because they're not using a headset, and their built-in mike is picking up the speaker output). Don't blame the speaker.

If there is background noise, someone is not muted.

If there's some weird feedback noise, it's probably because someone is not using a headset and is not muted.